Literary rabble-rousers on display

Thursday

Jun 28, 2012 at 12:01 AMJun 28, 2012 at 11:21 AM

WASHINGTON - A new Library of Congress exhibition, "The Books That Shaped America," ignores the familiar high-culture shibboleths ( Western Canon by Harold Bloom and Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce) and embraces tomes that most people know and many have read.

WASHINGTON — A new Library of Congress exhibition, “The Books That Shaped America,” ignores the familiar high-culture shibboleths (Western Canon by Harold Bloom and Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce) and embraces tomes that most people know and many have read.

With a run through Sept. 29 in the Thomas Jefferson Building, the exhibit — with its titles chosen by the library staff through considerable wrangling — displays what one might call the classics of upset and troublemaking.

Many of the books, when first published, shocked people, made them angry or shook their deepest beliefs. They shamed readers with accounts of greed, racism, corruption, puritanism and provincial narrow-mindedness.

“The Books That Shaped America” underscores that, in the United States, anything might be questioned, nothing is set in stone and everything could be changed. The nation, after all, is grounded in revolution.

Self-transformation becomes the great American theme. So the show has the Benjamin Franklin autobiography, a stirring guidebook to personal improvement; the Frederick Douglass account of his years of slavery and his escape from it; and Walden, the Henry David Thoreau argument for self-fulfillment no matter what the opinions of society.

Here, too, is one of Horatio Alger Jr.’s rags-to-riches novels, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ great jungle bildungsroman Tarzan of the Apes, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in which the poor boy James Gatz dreams of all the glittering prizes.

Near the start of the list is Thomas Paine’s call to arms, Common Sense, followed by W.E.B. Du Bois’ searing The Souls of Black Folk; Jacob Riis’ sickening account of urban poverty, How the Other Half Lives; Ida M. Tarbell’s “muckraking” History of the Standard Oil Company; Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which exposed the unsanitary conditions in Chicago’s meat-packing industry; and, finally, in our own time, And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts’ groundbreaking account of the AIDS epidemic, and The Words of Cesar Chavez, the inspiring leader of the United Farm Workers.

It is refreshing to see William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Allen Ginsberg representing 20th-century American poetry instead of those usual cosmopolitan modernists Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

But Walt Whitman is here, too, and Emily Dickinson, and all of them remind us that the recurrent theme of American literature is loneliness, that somehow amid all our plenty we remain hungry for connection with others. It’s little wonder that two of the most popular plays in American theater are about such yearning: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

The Library of Congress invites people to register their comments on the exhibit and its titles at the website www.loc.gov/ bookfest.

The exhibit is meant to generate argument, surprise and controversy. The Library of Congress also deserves kudos for having produced this exceptionally imaginative and convincing list of many, if certainly not all, of “the books that shaped America.”